How Accessible is URI to Students With Disabilities?

Only a handful of buildings on campus provide a handicap entrance. | Photo by Anna Meassick

Although many buildings at the University of Rhode Island do not have ramps or elevators, it is not safe to automatically assume that the campus is unaccessible for people with disabilities.

Frankie Minor, the director of Housing and Residential Life (HRL), said although some buildings on campus don’t seem accessible, his office always works to accommodate everyone.

“We try and [determine] what it is that individual student needs and what does he or she need to be successful here,” said Minor.

Minor said that although many dormitories on campus don’t have elevators, students could still have access to the first level. This opens up the opportunity to live in most buildings on campus, depending on the situation.

Minor said that it is important that students reach out to Disability Services to start the process.

“Everything we do is really tailored to the student,” said Paige Ramsdell, the assistant dean for accessibility and inclusion and the director of Disability Services for Students.

Ramsdell said that a student will provide documentation of a disability and describe certain aspects of student life that are barriers to them, and from there accommodations will be made. Some of the barriers disability services works to help students overcome are classes, campus housing, dining, parking and transportation.

“For a student who uses a wheelchair, we’d be looking at a number of different areas of campus life that might be impacted,” said Ramsdell. “Are they able to reach the dining hall? Do they need point to point transportation? Are we making sure that they’re not in a building on campus that does not have ramps or elevators?”

Ramsdell said if a student has to take a class in a building that is not handicap accessible, the class will be moved to a new location to accommodate the student with a disability.

“We just move the whole classroom, Enrollment Services is really great to work with,” Ramsdell said.

Disability Services has roughly 1,500 students registered with their office, which is around 9 percent of the student body at URI, according to Ramsdell.  

Ramsdell said that there is a common misconception that disabilities are strictly things you can see. However, she stressed that that’s not always the case.

“Visible disabilities- deaf, blind, or use of a wheelchair, that’s actually a really small percentage of the population we work with, like under 5 percent of the students on campus. A much larger percentage of the population is students with invisible disabilities.”

Mental illness is among some of the invisible disabilities Ramsdell referenced. She said that about one-third of the 1,500 students the office serves are related to mental health this year.

“The majority of our students have [a] disability diagnosis that you’d never be able to see, or even when you talk to them you wouldn’t necessarily know that they have,” said Ramsdell.

Ramsdell does think that there is room to improve with accessibility for students with disabilities.

“Always, there is always more we could do,” said Ramsdell. “There are some things we just don’t have control over. We don’t have control over the fact that this campus is on a very steep hill. And we don’t have a lot of control over the [historic] buildings.”

Ramsdell said that the historic buildings on campus can create problems for accessibility.

“The historic buildings, we get this double whammy, where we’re trying to respect the [history] of the institutions and these beautiful buildings built in the 1800s, but in the 1800s they weren’t thinking about wheelchair clearance or ramps or anything like that.”

Though Ramsdell feels there is always more they can do, over the eight years she has worked at URI she said there has been growth in terms of attitudes and perceptions of students with disabilities.

“It’s a slow moving train, but we’re getting a lot more students on board,” said Ramsdell. “In our hearts, campus wide I feel like this institution really does have their heart in the right place.”

Nick Marotta, the Student Senate president-elect, has two major focuses regarding accessibility for students with disabilities. The first thing Marotta said he wants to accomplish is to conduct a campus wide accessibility study.

“What I intend on doing is having members of our Student Senate [work] with members of the landscape architecture department, because those students are [versed] in ADA guidelines and code,” said Marotta.

Usually Senate would pursue this internally, however, Marotta said Senate is not versed in this whereas the landscape architecture department is.

“After coming up with those findings, I’d like to present it to, possibly, President Dooley and other relevant parties to say, ‘Look, this is what we found. X, Y and Z buildings are inaccessible,’” said Marotta. “And when a building is inaccessible, that can be demeaning and humiliating to students who struggle with mobility issues. So, we want to just bring that to light.”

Ramsdell said that Disability Services and Housing and Residential Life are currently working together to make plans for returning and incoming students for the fall.